This sentence is hard to write, maybe hard to read and surely tough to
believe. But the time has come to confront an awful truth, that Simon Shaw’s
rugby life is coming to an end. This may be a shock, but the stark reality
of the situation is that he probably has only a month to go.

Four months shy of his 40th birthday and well into his third decade of
first-class rugby, it had been generally assumed that he was immortal, that
only his splendidly cauliflowered ears would bear testimony to the years,
that he would continue flying high